The website Prison Planet has posted Paper: Global Cooling began in 2003 which refers to my weblog post below. I want to emphasize two issues here. First, the data does NOT support a conclusion that the global annual heat content has been declining. It shows a lack of statistically significant warming. Second, and an even more important issue, is that the Knox and Douglas study does NOT

“falsif[y] the entire anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.”

Overstatements on all sides of this issue are what is preventing an effective scientific discourse on this subject.

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There is an excellent new paper by Bob Knox and David Douglas that provides further insight into the issue of the monitoring of global climate system heat changes. The paper is

A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.